National geographic presents ...
Trip Start
May 04, 2003
1
25
80
Trip End
Ongoing
Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary, Swaziland
Saturday, August 16, 2003
apparently. Is that like Stargate? Or more like the time portal in Austin Powers ..
Well I'm gonna write some stuff up anyway and keep it in my email inbox and post it
next time I get online. How's that? oh alrightie then. So I'm in the capital city of
Mbabane today, today being Friday; I dropped off my passport at the Mozambican
Embassy in the morning and now I gotta wait until 2:34 to pick it up. That's right,
2:34 or thereabouts. Well the rest of yesterday turned out to be quite magnificent.
I made it to the Main Camp in the reserve to see the hippo feeding, which was kinda
anticlimactic. The thing is, apparently in the wild hippos don't eat cornmeal out of
a bucket. But this one did, came nice and near and the drooling crowd pressed in close and cozy and went click click click. Man those guys are FAT. The hippos too.
We're talking old school Oprah. And they have thin legs, compared to their body mass anyway; no wonder they spend most of their time in water, they probably have about a 12 minute window on dry land before their ankles dislocate. But hey, they are the most dangerous animal in Africa; more people are killed by hippos every year than any other animal, so I guess that warrants a dose of respect. The Main Camp had a little porch over the water hole, where there were other hippos blowing bubbles and a couple crocs and turtles hanging out, so that was very shweet. I decided to go for a walk around the reserve, I really wanted to see the giraffes. So I'm walking along the path in a patch of grass, wondering if I'll see any animals, thinking about GIRAFFES, not really looking around, and almost ran into a warthog. They are little mean looking bastards I tell ya. They're only about thigh high, which is actually perfect height for their evil tusks, which stick up from their lower jaw on both sides of the snout, to cause some really unpleasant damage. And they have these big bushy eyebrows that make them look like a frowning Brezhnev, and a mohawk of stiff yellowish hair running down the length of their head and back. And they're not shy, they stare you down. Whatchoo lookin at punk? After my warthog encouter I decided to keep my head up and couldn't believe how many animals I saw. Everywhere, just hanging around, chowing. The path went through a little forest, well grove more like, and the weirdest thing - I saw a cute little monkey, like a pet monkey kinda monkey, and I'm looking at it, trying to creep a little closer, get a better look, spank it maybe; it's halfway up the tree, I stumble on a root and look down for a fraction of a second, and when I look back up it's gone. And I never found it again. No sound, no nothing, just disappeared. Made me wonder if it was ever there. I started taking malaria prevention pills, since Mozambique is full of it, but the thing with malaria pills is they got weird side effects. One of them makes you really sensitive to sunlight and burn like a mofo and break out in blisters, the other one apparently gives you "vivid nightmares". In other words, it makes you flip out, and if you got psycho tendencies and OD you can really lose it. Sounds like a good time, so that's the one I'm on. I wonder if the monkey was just an anti-malaria apparition. Well it's probly better than malaria; I talked to a bunch of people who've had it and it doesn't sound like the right kind of party in anyone's pants. Anyway, after the monkey I also saw the new prettiest bird in the world, nother little one with bright green back and deep indigo chest and a lighter blue belly and burning red throat. No mohawk on this one. A little further down, after leaving the forest, I had to cross a stream, and as I came up the opposite hill and crested the far bank, I almost ran into a kudu, just standing in the middle of the path like he was waiting for me. Hey there buddy. We just looked at each for a while, it was one of those non-blinking contests, I had one later with a zebra too. He was maybe shoulder height, dark brown with thin light stripes running down his sides from his mohawked back to his belly, and had nice big corkscrew horns. After a while he got bored of me and started eating the side of the path, so I take it I won the contest, he blinked first (the zebra beat me by the way). He didn't seem to wanna move too far off the path, so I had to inch by him, "excuse me mister", it was like getting into an elevator past a fat man getting out. Later along the way I saw big black things, what I thought at first were a bunch of burnt stumps until one moved - turned out to be wildebeest. But the champ of views came a little while later, when I came across one of those National Geographic scenes. The sun was setting behind the hills over my shoulder, and the sky in front was turning red. The grassland sloped up a little, so the scattered little flat topped trees (whose name I still haven't found out) were outlined against the red of the sky, and the whole zoo came out to graze. There were impalas, who are very shy and run in huge long jumps (and apparently one of whom I ate for dinner later that night I was told afterwards, and it made me sad though it was very tasty), unlike the warthog, which were also around staring me down. There were more kudus and little blesbok, which are much like the bontebok I saw a couple months ago near Swellendam. There was a group of 6 zebras and a wildebeest. It was interesting how the different animals reacted to my presence. The warthogs couldn't care less and every now and then gave me an irritated look, "you're still here?". The impalas and blesbok, as soon as they got wind of me would run off to a greater distance. And the zebras would never run, but constantly keep a good distance. I don't know actually if that was because of me or if they're just walking grazers; the other animals would graze in one place and move on and the zebras and the wildebeest, which looked like he'd joined the zebra bunch, were always on the move, they'd take a bite, a step, bite, step. Anyway, that's my animals stories for the day.
It's Saturday now, I've got my visa, and will probably be heading out to Maputo tomorrow or Monday. I spent most of yesterday in Mbabane, one of two towns in Swaziland, and I must say I was surprised by the cleanliness and order of the place. I guess I ignorantly assumed that everything outside South Africa was like the Transkei - beautiful, undeveloped, dirty, no infrastructure. Not Swaziland - in many ways it seems more advanced than South Africa. The roads are in excellent condition, the people are friendly and educated; the city had one of those giant modern suburban type malls with little landscaped fountains and tonnes of shops and stores where you can buy anything you don't need. The kind of place I like to avoid, but didn't expect to find in Swaziland. Despite my disdain for cities in general, I must say that Mbabane was a much more pleasant place to be than any city in South Africa. Swaziland was not subjected to the idiocy of apartheid, and one thing that is sweetly missing here is the racial tension and division that is palpable almost anywhere you go in South Africa.
I feel sick of typing and it's a beautiful day outside, but I wanna mention one more thing. Sitting around the fire last night, I had not one but two nutty small world type encounters. First I got talking to Jeff, who's from Toronto, but it turns out he's a grad student at Tufts and lives on Curtis street, about 5 minutes away from where I used to live, on the way to the liquor store. And then I got talking to a couple who turned out to be from the Czech Republic, in Pretoria for a semester as exchange students. They also got robbed in South Africa, except much worse than I; some champs with knives took their backpack with pretty much everything they had. So needless to say they're not exactly loving the country and can't wait to get back home. Damn shame. We all went to see Swazi dancing at the main camp at night, which was great fun, though I wouldn't classify it as culturally enriching. I'm pretty sure the dancer guys were making fun of us, as they should, and god only knows what they were singing about. But it was great fun. OK that's it I'm done. I'm either gonna go for a hike or try to make my way to another reserve and see some rhino or something. over and out ..
